'A Doll's House' Review

7/10

Seeing The Young Vic's award-winning production of Ibsen's A Doll's House was an opportunity for the Year 13 English Literature and Language class to expand on their understanding of the text. With a naturalistic set in keeping contextually with the play, the lighting, sound and rotating set gave the production modernist undertones, making this play seem surprisingly fresh and innovative.

The main success of the production was due to Hattie Morahan’s riveting and immersive performance as lead role Nora, with an accomplished cast supporting her. She brought Ibsen’s protagonist to life enabling the audience to come away with a greater comprehension of the play’s themes of patriarchy and the infantilisation of women within the Victorian household.

The titular metaphor relates to Nora’s restricted life within her home, and her constant reliance on men due to the society in which she lives. Ibsen, in the original text, is heavy handed in this metaphor, explicitly explaining it during the final act where a more subtle approach would have been beneficial. Because of this, the production we saw also suffered from this technique yet the revolving stage created a more three-dimensional perspective of the metaphor, making Ibsen’s intentions feel less forthright and in-your-face.

On top of this, the fickleness of the characters, who accentuate volatile changes of mood and mind, whilst heightening the building tension making Nora’s climactic departure more shocking, also casts an unrealistic shadow on the play: many of these characters are not believable, and thereby as an audience we feel less sympathy for the situation. The power of Morahan’s performance largely counter-acted this somewhat, but not enough to make the production as believable, and therefore as effective, as it should be.

Contextually, ‘A Doll’s House’ remains an extremely relevant production in modern society: gender inequality is still an issue and with a seemingly even more complex array of battles raging about extremism, popular culture and gender roles and values.

Regardless of how Ibsen handles his feminist intention, this play does well to illustrate plainly the fundamental stupidity and ignorance of patriarchal societies, and acts as a needed reminder of the many social aspects that have an undercurrent of misogyny regardless of the twentieth century’s indisputable progression away from a Victorian mindset.